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🧭 Mythic Map – Essential How to Play Guide

Objective:
Find the Iron Crown, hidden somewhere in the ruins or buildings of a procedurally generated 20×20 world.

You begin in the centre of the map with 50 supplies. A yellow @ symbol shows your player position when you view the map.\

🎮 Controls

N / E / S / W — Turn to face a direction

T — Travel forward one tile (in the direction you’re facing)

M — View the map

G — Generate a new world

Q — Quit

You always move forward — turning changes your facing direction.

👀 What You See

Each turn, the game describes:

• Your current location
• What lies immediately ahead
• What lies further in the distance
• What can be seen on the horizon

Occasionally important features to your left or right

Think of it as surveying the landscape from your position.

🥾 Supplies & Survival

• Moving consumes supplies.
• Rough terrain (forests, hills) costs more.
• Roads may cost less.
• Some terrain is impassable.
• If supplies reach 0, the game ends.

🏨 Replenishing Supplies

• Find a Coaching Inn (marked as C on the map).
• When you step onto an Inn:
• You automatically rest.
• Supplies +10

Plan routes carefully — Inns are your lifeline.

🗺 Map View

• Press M to see the full map:
• Terrain types are colour coded.
• Your position is marked with “@”.
• Inns are shown as a Magenta “C”

🏆 Winning

• Locate the hidden quest location (in a ruin or building) to recover the Iron Crown and win.
• Explore. Conserve supplies. Use Inns wisely. Survey the land before moving.

That’s all you need to begin.

Development and High Level Code Walkthrough

There’s a very deliberate lineage behind Mythic Map.

Years ago I was fascinated by the way The Lords of Midnight by Mike Singleton handled scale and perspective. It showed you what you could see from your position — mountains looming in the distance, forests rising beyond hills — all rendered through clever layered graphics on very limited hardware. You’ll see from one of my earlier projects in this Stardot subforum post “Landscaping” is a very simple version of this.

Mythic Map takes that same core principle — but applies it to text.

Instead of scaled bitmap landscapes, we now generate “scaled” narrative description:

• Immediate foreground (1 tile ahead)
• Mid-distance (2 tiles)
• Horizon (3 tiles)
• Side scanning for “important” landmarks

It’s essentially using the idea of Landscaping from The Lords of Midnight, distilled into MODE 7 prose.

Design Philosophy

The key idea:

The world is not just where you stand. It is what you perceive.

That’s why PROCLook is the heart of the game.

I’ll stay deliberately high level here.

[b]1. Setup & Data Structures[/b]
DIM M%(19,19)
DIM N$(6,5)
DIM VOC$(9), VAGUE$(6), PHR$(3)

M%(19,19) – The world grid (20×20).

Each cell encodes:

• Terrain type (tens digit)
• Subtype / progression stage (units digit)

N$() holds terrain names.
VOC$() adjectives.
PHR$() distance phrases.
VAGUE$() horizon descriptors.

This is lightweight but powerful: small data tables, combinatorial output.

PROCMakePath

The world is procedurally forged in layers:

• Base terrain (woods vs hills)
• Rivers carved with a directional path
• Roads laid similarly
• Ruins & buildings scattered
• Quest location hidden in valid terrain

This is intentionally fast and replayable.

Notably:

• Rivers and roads use staged progression (STP%) to simulate widening.
• Impassable terrain is encoded in subtype 5.
• Supplies introduce pressure.

This creates:

• Movement constraints
• Resource tension
• Directional decision making

The Core Innovation – PROCLook

This is where the “Lords of Midnight principle” lives.

FOR DIST%=1 TO 3

We scan outward three tiles in the facing direction.
Each distance band:

• Has different descriptive richness
• Uses rank filtering (FNrank)
• Adds side scanning for significant landmarks

The rank system is subtle but key:

DEF FNrank

• Mountains, keeps, impassables = higher importance.
• Trees and low features = lower importance.

This prevents descriptive overload while preserving drama.

The result is sparse but evocative and atmospheric!

Travel & Survival

PROCTravel handles:

• Movement vectors based on facing
• Impassable checks
• Supply drain
• Rest at Inns (+10 supplies)
• Proximity tension message

Victory condition

This creates the gameplay loop:

Look → Decide → Travel → Consume Supplies → Repeat

Map Rendering

PROCPreRender builds colourised MAP_ROW$ strings.
It uses:

• Character tables
• Colour tables
• Special overrides (e.g. Inn = “C”)

This means:

• The map draws instantly.
• No recalculation during display.

What’s Working Well

The perception-based viewing model.

• Distance layering.
• Importance ranking (I think)
• Procedural naming of rivers and roads.

Resource pressure loop.

Clean modular procedures.

Where It Needs Work

The English descriptions are functional — but not yet mythic.

Examples:
“Directly ahead, ancient a Forest awaits.”
“On the horizon, dark shapes can be seen.”

They work mechanically.
But they lack rhythm, cohesion, and narrative tone….so if there’s enough memory I think these could be improved.

What we need:

• Better grammar flow (for sure)
• Perhaps less repetition.
• Stronger atmosphere?
• Even occasional surprise phrases.
• Maybe even variation in sentence structure.